“We have been friendly to cyclists. Now it’s time for cyclists to be friendlier to the city.” -Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City Transportation Commissioner.

The Times reports on new enforcement and educational measures concerning the uneasy relationship between cars, pedestrians, and cyclists on New York City streets emerging in relation to efforts to open the street to broader populations of users through the construction of over 250 miles of bike lanes and addition of thousands of bike racks in the city in recent years.

I’m reminded of the Contrail Biking Community Tool that we blogged about a year ago and wondering if it’s the sharing, or the nature of the partitioning and articulating of the street that’s the issue here.

Residents of the Wakefield section of the Bronx are up in arms over what they regard as an oversaturation of social service institutions and facilities located in the neighborhood. A vacant spot under the elevated subway lines is the intended site of an HIV patient and recovering addict shelter.

From the Times: “Two other proposals, both in early planning and approval stages, would involve more temporary shelters — one for 200 homeless veterans, and another across the street for 100 single adults. A fourth residence is planned less than a mile away — a shelter for abused women.

This dispute comes against a background of a teeming homeless population in New York City as a result of persistent joblessness and the cascade of home foreclosures. On Oct. 4, the city’s Department of Homeless Services recorded 35,609 individuals staying in roughly 250 shelters around the five boroughs, among them 8,049 families with children. City officials are under legal mandates to provide housing, and officials say they have tried to apportion it fairly. Four residences, they contend, are not too many for a single neighborhood when some neighborhoods have 13 social service centers.”

New York City’s comprehensive waterfront plan Vision 2020 is now available for public view and download. “this document contains the preliminary recommendations prepared for the purpose of fostering further public discussion. These recommendations are subject to—and are expected to—change, based on additional input from the public.”

The Jodi Lane Foundation, named after a woman who was electrocuted to death by stray voltage under an East Village sidewalk in 2004 maintains a map of all reported instances of stray voltage in New York City. Information displayed represents energized objects detected and repaired between January 2007 and September 2009. Watch your step!

The NYTimes reports…Across the nation, the system that Congress created to protect the nation’s waters under the Clean Water Act of 1972 today often fails to prevent pollution. The New York Times has compiled data on more than 200,000 facilities that have permits to discharge pollutants and collected responses from states regarding compliance. Information about facilities contained in this database comes from two sources: the Environmental Protection Agency and the California State Water Resources Control Board. The database does not contain information submitted by the states. Full Story »

Civic Bailout intends to research, develop, and implement durable forms of interface between citizens and the institutions that govern them. The current banking crisis, as a context, identifies a series of inconsistencies within the sharing of information between the institution and the citizen. This can be seen as a civic crisis, whereas we define civic as the transfer, as well as feedback of knowledge between organizations of citizens and institutional organizations. Research into current forms of civic event, space, and interface show a disconnection between the traditional civic space’s within the city, and the more ephemeral space produced by the civic event. We propose a civic scaffold, latent with interface, which, initially is able to better respond to the fluctuating dynamics of the civic.

In order to promote communication between the city and its citizens and between citizens and citizens, our proposed project is a deployable civic scaffold that answers to NYC’s and its citizen’s desires and concerns. With the capabilities to infiltrate into vacancies caused by the financial crisis, it resuscitates the dying infrastructure and injects new civic programs for the citizens.

We feel that our project heightens our knowledge of how society perceives their environment and its fluctuating conditions. What is the initial reaction of the citizen to issues of concerns and how does that reaction grow into a rhizomatic group of citizens that produces an ephemeral space through different forms of demonstrations. Our project produces a cognitive infrastructure that is able to interact with the citizens at a local scale and the city at a global scale, thereby bridging the two scalar differences and stimulating a revolutionary civic reactivity and allowing the citizens to be heard. It obtains an open source of communication that empowers the citizens to take part of their city’s future.

An early example of the scaffold deployed on site in an interior circulation scenario, vs. a vacant space bridging scenario. There is a notion to give back vacant space to the public, and adding redundant circulation to increase accessibility to these newly civic spaces.

Currently our research is focused into the materiality of the civic scaffold system, and at what scale flexibility operates at – We’ll post video from our model’s asap – until then, be sure to check out our midterm presentation.

These initial output’s of a mapping exercise will help us to produce a build up, or layering of connections between architectural devices – where through interaction with the general public, can help to loosely spur civic event. The build up over time of different connection’s will hopefully produce intensities of civic space to work with operating within the context of the city. Context will provide a rule set for the movement of these devices, as well as their relationship to one another, so devices can become connected which will also effect their movement through the space of the city. more research is being partaken int othe specific context of two sites of analysis – foley square and union square.

We are looking at the conditions of stability/instability within the black and green makets that exist within new york city. We developed a tool to analyze stability based on rate of change between distributer and receiver within the two networks. What are the qualities within a stable vs unstable network? How can one learn from the other.

We want to see how an existing network of organization amongst greenmarket distributers and receivers shifts, based on outlets of distribution. Thus showing the overlaps and fold’s within the network… and how throughout the week, the network, because of the top-down infrastructure(where market is open, who is able to sell) is able to form in some areas, and break apart in others.

We are comparing the different players in the greenmarket’s and blackmarket’s that exist in new york city. So far, our research has led to the idea that both systems operate with a set of self-deterministic goals (agents who make the sale’s) within the protocol of a top-down infrastructure set up to allow them to negotiate there way different parts of the city and create informal as well as formal organizations.

initial research into soon to be obsolete systems within new york city, and how technologies currently in use to fix/maintain them, could possibly be utilized in other aspects of the city and for the generation of material rather than the maintenence of existing systems.